Baseball Maverick Page 13

  Schueler told Beane he would write up reports on teams the A’s were about to play: how to position the infield and outfield against particular hitters, how to pitch which batters, what to expect against which pitchers, and so on. A pro scouting job would be a good way to start working toward a GM job down the line, but the work was demanding. He would be on the road for weeks at a time.

  “At some point that’s something I’d be interested in,” Beane said.

  “Well, I think you’d be good at it,” Schueler told him. “So when you’re ready to stop playing, let me know.”

  Beane went home that night and talked about the idea with his wife at the time, Cathy, a former all-American tennis player at UC San Diego, where Beane had also taken some courses. The more he turned it over in his mind, the more he thought: “Why wait?” He knew he could eke out a couple hundred more big-league at bats over the next season or two, run up some more big-league service time, but Beane didn’t care about any of that. He cared about doing what felt right for his future—and for his family, which was about to grow. Cathy was due to give birth that May to their first child, a daughter they would name Casey. The next day at Phoenix Muni, Beane found Schueler and told him he’d love to try advance scouting. “I’m ready now,” he said.

  “You’re kind of young,” Schueler said. “You’ve probably got some time.”

  “No, this is what I want to do,” Beane said.

  “Well, let me talk to Tony and Sandy.”

  Alderson presided over a meeting of all the coaches and front-office people to go over which players they wanted to keep on the twenty-five-man roster and which had to go. They went through every player in camp one by one and anyone in the room was free to speak up. “The conversation turned to Billy Beane,” Schueler told me, “and out of twelve guys in the room, I think there was only one who wanted to keep him.”

  “Ron, you’ve been around every day watching him, what’s your opinion?” Alderson asked.

  “He has not performed well, he has not earned a spot on the team,” Schueler said. “But I think he has a great baseball mind and with some training he could work in the front office or possibly even in scouting.”

  “OK, are you the one who is going to teach him how to scout?” Alderson cracked.

  The general manager wasn’t sold just yet, but he did know Beane had a knack for evaluating talent. The previous season, La Russa had often asked Beane about different young players on other teams. Having spent so much time at Triple-A, he’d played against many of them and had lucid enough insights to keep La Russa and his pitching coach, Dave Duncan, coming back with more questions. La Russa and Duncan favored Beane getting a shot as a scout. That left the general manager.

  “He came in and in one breath said, ‘I want to retire and I want to be the advance scout,’” Alderson recalls. “I knew Tony was pretty excited about the possibility. If I had any skepticism, it was that as a player who had not hit for power or taken walks, Billy would not embrace this approach we were trying to inculcate in the organization.”

  “Sandy had his shorts on and everything,” Beane remembers. “He looked at me and goes, ‘No promises from here on out, but we’ll give it a try.’”

  Alderson’s skepticism fired Beane up.

  “I was bound and determined to make myself valuable enough to where they’d want to keep me on,” Beane says now. “I literally went from stretching with the players and having the conversation to the next day walking in to the staff meeting in my uniform. I have not swung at a pitch since that day. And I have never looked back.”

  A lot of baseball men had the eight-months-pregnant bellies to prove they were never going to break a sweat if they could help it, but even the rare few who did try to get in a little exercise would never dream of venturing outside the hotel. Then there was the Alderson approach. “He’d go running and I’d go running with him, because I ran, too, or we’d sort of bump into each other running,” Beane says. “That was part of the adventure of Sandy. One of my favorite ones was when we were in the Dominican Republic and we were driving by the old Olympic Stadium and we stopped and went for a run. We didn’t have a route, but we were running the streets of Santo Domingo for forty or forty-five minutes.”

  They ran together at different spots around the country in Beane’s years as an advance scout, and as the two got to know each other, Beane impressed Alderson with his energy and curiosity. “Billy was a sponge,” says Jay Alves. “Billy was sharp enough to understand: I can learn from that man. Any of us who were around Sandy, it changed us. It helped us be better. You’d be crazy not to follow Sandy.”

  Walt Jocketty, hired by Charlie Finley, moved on in June 1993 after thirteen years with the A’s, taking a job as assistant general manager of the Colorado Rockies. Jocketty agonized over the decision. “I felt it was a good time to try something different,” Jocketty told me. “When I talked to Sandy about it, after they had offered me the job, he told me he didn’t know how much longer the Haas family was going to own the ball club. He said I should go for it.”

  Beane started as assistant general manager that July, and his timing couldn’t have been much worse. “We were soon to be sold,” Beane told me. “We were going from a high payroll team to a low. I was thinking, ‘Great timing, Billy, right? My front-office career will be a year.’”

  Beane’s education in statistical analysis under Alderson’s direction started with sitting him down to talk to Eric Walker. “He will walk you through it and you’ll understand everything we’re doing,” Alderson told Beane.

  Walker wrote up a sixty-six-page report specifically for Beane on “Winning Baseball,” described on its cover as “An objective, numerical, analytic analysis of the principles and practices involved in the design of a winning baseball team.” Walker then added, right there on the cover, a quote from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson: “A thousand stories which the ignorant tell, and believe, die away at once when the computist takes them in his grip.” Walker might as well have included the rest of the quote on “computation”: “Cultivate in yourself a disposition to numerical inquiries: they will give you entertainment in solitude by the practice, and reputation in public by the effect.”

  Beane, handed the report just before he and Alderson flew to Toronto for Game 1 of the 1993 World Series, devoured it all. If he’d always felt a battle between his restless mind and the don’t-think-just-hit athlete’s mentality, now under Alderson’s tutelage he’d found a system of thought in which he could truly come into his own. At one point in our interview, Beane joked that his whole career had been almost like plagiarism, so much did he glean from Eric Walker and Bill James and Alderson, before putting his own stamp on it. And not just the statistics. “Working out, the shorts, those are all Sandy’s things,” Beane told me. “To this day I still work out every game during the game. This all started when Sandy did it—and even not watching the games.”

  Alderson and Beane also bonded while driving from Oakland to go see prospects in action. Often when the A’s were on the road the two would drive eighty miles east together to Modesto in the great, sprawling valley of California, Alderson behind the wheel, Beane riding shotgun. They’d have the radio tuned to the A’s game—­sometimes. Beane wanted to listen to the games. Alderson didn’t and kept changing the station.

  “What are you doing?” Beane would ask him.

  “Nothing good can happen when we’re pitching,” Alderson would say.

  The compromise was to listen only when the A’s were at bat. “That was sort of our détente, driving out there to Modesto,” Beane says. “So whenever our team was pitching, Sandy would turn it off. Inevitably, I’d try to work on him.”

  “We’ve got to have three outs by now,” Beane would say.

  “We’ve got to give it a little more time,” Alderson would say.

  Beane, looking back more than twenty years later, laughs at his young self. “So that inevitably morphed to where as a GM I couldn’t watch
anything. Watch it? Forget it. I realized when you are the GM, it was sort of protection from yourself, from the intensity and the idea you can’t control anything.”

  I started covering the A’s as a full-time beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle ten games before a strike ended the 1994 season. I was at spring training in ’95 when Alderson’s young protégé, Beane, would follow him around in the stands at Papago Park, the Arizona buttes in the background, wearing the exact same straw hat, khaki shorts, madras cotton shirt, and sandals. “It’s like watching a baby duck following the big duck around!” my friend Pedro Gomez of the Sacramento Bee would say to me, laughing as we watched them go by. We weren’t making fun of Beane. Others, notably the great big-game pitcher Dave Stewart, had wished they could find themselves in the role of apprentice to the master, following him around (literally) and watching everything he did and emulating it. Beane’s boyish good looks and charming openness were pronounced back then, and he was eager to learn, devotedly working his way through the fat Victor Hugo novel Les Misérables on team charters and more than a little proud of that fact.

  I mixed it up that spring in a memorable pickup basketball game with Alderson and Beane. Alderson was forty-seven, five years removed from having been named American League Executive of the Year a third time in a row after the 1990 season. He was a fit and fierce competitor, and he grinned at the prospect of teaming up with Beane to take on some sportswriters. Opposing them was a group that included three of us born in August 1962, Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times, Gomez, and me.

  “Check out the Marine!” Gomez and I said to each other a couple of times running up and down the court, staring in wonder at the meticulous defense Alderson was playing on DiGi. Finally at one point, a stunned DiGi turned to run up the court and muttered over his shoulder: “At ease, soldier!”

  Gomez and I stared: Did you hear that? Oh my god! He just said that to the Marine?

  Alderson was not even sure if DiGi said what he thought he did. But just in case, he dialed it up a notch. It was a small gym, the walls barely a foot beyond the out-of-bounds line, and one time down the court Alderson flexed his knees and squared his shoulders and set a pick that sent DiGi flying into the concrete wall. “From that point on he was guarding me like it was Game 7,” DiGiovanna says now. “I was beaten up.”

  I went over to DiGi afterward to ask him: “Don’t you know Alderson’s a Vietnam vet?”

  He turned pale. He’d had no idea. Gomez and I, buddies on the beat in those years, had already taken to calling Alderson “the Marine” between us now and then, but after the DiGi game it was “the Marine” every single time: That’s who he was. That was the key to understanding him.

  “Playing basketball with Sandy was part of his leadership,” Billy Beane told me. “He wants passing, he wants movement, he wants setting picks, and he’s very intense. Taking a thirty-footer on a breakaway, you don’t want to be on Sandy’s team, because he’s going to let you know about it. He wants to win, but he wants to do it the right way. If you were on the other team or even if you played for him the first time, you’d go, ‘He’s kind of kidding, right? He’s really not that into this, is he?’ And if you knew him, you’d go: ‘No, no, he’s into it. He is into it.’”

  Gomez and I used to joke about “Señor Sandy!” moments, because we always pictured Alderson waking up to coffee and the morning paper at his home in Tiburon, pounding his fist on the kitchen table as the maid, Esmerelda or Lupita, tried to calm his nerves.

  “Señor Sandy!” Pedro would cry out with Latin drama, laying on a thick Spanish accent to mimic the maid’s voice. “Your blood pressure!”

  The joke was that we all knew Alderson could shift from calm and collected to enraged in a heartbeat, and we all marveled at how he did that and retained both an alert intelligence and wicked sense of humor. We’d all been on the wrong end of an angry Alderson outburst. But no matter how pissed off he got, he could usually laugh at himself and avoid taking himself too seriously. He had seen the world and seen combat, we all knew, and it earned him an eye that saw through the superficial or fleeting in a way we envied. When problem child slugger Ruben Sierra, frustrated at Alderson for pushing him to take more walks, made the grievous mistake of taking a verbal shot at Alderson in 1995, telling my San Francisco Chronicle colleague Joan Ryan that he’d like to pitch to Alderson to throw one “over his head,” Tony La Russa called Sierra “a village idiot” and let loose with a diatribe.

  “Every time he opens his mouth he makes a fool of himself,” La Russa said. “In this one case I’m going to say how full of shit he really is. He gets on Sandy because he never played. Here’s a guy who went to Vietnam. If Ruben ever went to Vietnam, he’d alternate between vomiting and shitting his pants.”

  Alderson ran marathons and kept fit. His Vietnam record and his status as literally a former poster boy for the Marine Corps set him apart and ruled out a certain kind of flak. The Sierra outburst was the exception that proved the rule. No one wanted to mess with Alderson, and the name the Spanish-speaking players had for him—“Sandy Anderson”—was often half whispered in a cadence of singsong reverence, as if they needed to have respect even in speaking about the man behind his back.

  Probably the topic that best brought out Alderson’s angry sense of humor in his years with the A’s was their cross-bay rivals, the media darling San Francisco Giants. “They haven’t even negotiated his salary yet,” Alderson cracked in February 1997 when the Giants announced they were paying Barry Bonds upwards of $11 million a year. “That was just a bribe to keep his mouth shut.”

  Late every offseason there was a media luncheon with team officials from both the Giants and the A’s, and it was the rare year that passed by without Alderson getting in his licks against his rivals. One February the luncheon was hosted by comedian Rob Schneider, who missed with just about every joke. Bob Quinn, the Giants’ general manager at the time, used the occasion to talk up a recent Giant acquisition, left-handed hitter Mel Hall.

  “He could fall out of bed and get a hit,” Quinn said.

  Alderson, flashing a little smirk, was up next.

  “I’d like to thank Rob Schneider for his jokes about the Giants and Bob Quinn for his joke about Mel Hall,” he said.

  By 1995 Walter Haas was almost out of time. He had more than lived up to the family tradition with his successful tenure as the leader of Levi Strauss & Co., with his public works, including building the A’s franchise into the pride of Oakland, and, above all, with his modest, gentlemanly style. Jay Alves remembers the owner spotting a stash of baseballs on a visit to the A’s clubhouse.

  “You think I could have a couple baseballs?” the owner asked.

  “Mr. Haas, you can have the whole bag,” Alves told him.

  Haas, seventy-nine, was fighting prostate cancer and in sharp physical decline by 1995. The Haas family sale of the A’s verged on the surreal. The buyers who emerged—tract-housing developers Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann—had, like Walter Haas, been approached about buying the team in the hope they would keep the A’s in Oakland. The team had been valued at $115 million and higher, but the Haas family consented to sell for a discounted price of $85 million—on the condition that the new owners agree to keep the team in Oakland for at least ten years. In January 1995 came the announcement that Schott and Hofmann had agreed to buy the A’s from the Haas family for the agreed-upon price. Then, as Walter Haas grew sicker, negotiations dragged out. Wally did his best to reach a settlement, but Schott and Hofmann had shifted their terms so often, it was getting to be a joke. At one point, Schott said to Wally. “You must think I’m a real prick.” Wally did not contest the point.

  “At that point I said to my dad, ‘We shouldn’t sell to these guys. They are so not cut from the same cloth as you.’”

  Walter Haas was so ill by that point he could not speak. He gave his son a hand gesture, a kind of hand chop, to indicate: They had to sell the team.

  Finally, an announce
ment came on July 22 that a “final agreement” had been reached on the sale, and Wally Haas explained to a Chronicle reporter: “We made concessions from the original terms that are several million dollars less.”

  The Schott-Hofmann program was to gut as much of the A’s organization as they could, including baseball operations. Here they ran into an obstacle: Alderson would stay only if they left the front office alone. If they wanted to slash personnel in baseball operations, the way they wanted to elsewhere, then they’d have to do that without Sandy Alderson in the organization.

  Billy Beane’s tradition of working out during every game dates back to that period. For years Alderson had made a habit of ­watching games in the owner’s box with Wally Haas. They were friends, comfortable with each other, and it all worked somehow. Moving forward, Alderson needed to watch games elsewhere. “So I started working out in the clubhouse,” he says.

  It was clear Alderson could not work long for Schott and Hofmann, but he also did not want to duck out without a thought for where the franchise would go next. “It was just a very different environment,” he says.

  Alderson did his best to soldier on. For years he’d given Beane more and more of a voice in decisions. They worked together the way that Alderson had worked with John Grinalds as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, each an extension of the other, but no one in doubt of who was in charge. Beane passed up potential GM jobs in Montreal and San Diego to keep learning. “A lot of guys move on from assistant GM not so much just because they want to be a GM, but because they’re so frustrated,” Beane says. “It’s just like a teenager: At some point you feel like you need to get out and break out on your own. One thing about Sandy was there was never any frustration internally. I knew I was never going to be as smart as Sandy.”